Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language

Since 1993, PROPOR Workshops have become an important forum for re- archers involved in the Computational Processing of Portuguese, both written and spoken. This PROPOR Workshop follows previous workshops held in 1993 (Lisboa, Portugal), 1996 (Curitiba, Brazil), 1998 (Porto Alegre, Brazil), 1999 ´ (Evora, Portugal) and 2000 (Atibaia, Brazil). The workshop has increasingly contributed to bring together researchers and industry partners from both sides of the Atlantic. The constitution of an international program committee and the adoption of high-standard referee procedures demonstrate the steady de- lopment of the ?eld and of its scienti?c community. This can also be seen in the realization of the satellite workshop AVALON, which constitutes the ?rst evaluation campaign of Portuguese NLP systems. Each one of the 64 submitted papers received a careful, triple blind-review by the program committee. All those who contributed are mentioned in the following pages. The reviewing process led to the selection of 41 papers for oral presentation, 24 regular papers and 17 short papers, which are published in this volume. Theworkshopandthisbookwerestructuredaroundtheeightfollowingmain topics: (i) speech analysis and recognition; (ii) speech synthesis; (iii) pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax, and the lexicon; (iv) tools, resources, and appli- tions; (v) dialogue systems; (vi) summarization and information extraction; and (vii) evaluation.

Speech Analysis and Recognition.- Devoicing Measures of European Portuguese Fricatives.- AUDIMUS.MEDIA: A Broadcast News Speech Recognition System for the European Portuguese Language.- Pitch Restoration for Robust Speech Recognition.- Speech Synthesis.- Grapheme-Phone Transcription Algorithm for a Brazilian Portuguese TTS.- Improving the Accuracy of the Speech Synthesis Based Phonetic Alignment Using Multiple Acoustic Features.- Evaluation of a Segmental Durations Model for TTS.- From Portuguese to Mirandese: Fast Porting of a Letter-to-Sound Module Using FSTs.- A Methodology to Analyze Homographs for a Brazilian Portuguese TTS System.- Automatic Discovery of Brazilian Portuguese Letter to Phoneme Conversion Rules through Genetic Programming.- Experimental Phonetics Contributions to the Portuguese Articulatory Synthesizer Development.- Pragmatics, Discourse, Semantics, Syntax, and the Lexicon.- A Study on the Reliability of Two Discourse Segmentation Models.- Reusability of Dictionaries in the Compilation of NLP Lexicons.- Homonymy in Natural Language Processes: A Representation Using Pustejovsky's Qualia Structure and Ontological Information.- Using Adaptive Formalisms to Describe Context-Dependencies in Natural Language.- Some Regularities of Frozen Expressions in Brazilian Portuguese.- Tools, Resources, and Applications.- Selva: A New Syntactic Parser for Portuguese.- An Account of the Challenge of Tagging a Reference Corpus for Brazilian Portuguese.- Multi-level NER for Portuguese in a CG Framework.- HMM/MLP Hybrid Speech Recognizer for the Portuguese Telephone SpeechDat Corpus.- Managing Linguistic Resources and Tools.- Using Morphossyntactic Information in TTS Systems: Comparing Strategies for European Portuguese.- Timber! Issues in Treebank Building and Use.-A Lexicon-Based Stemming Procedure.- Contractions: Breaking the Tokenization-Tagging Circularity.- A Linguistic Approach Proposal for Mechanical Design Using Natural Language Processing.- Identification of Direct/Indirect Discourse in Children's Stories.- Curupira: A Functional Parser for Brazilian Portuguese.- ANELL: A Web System for Portuguese Corpora Annotation.- Email2Vmail - An Email Reader.- A Large Speech Database for Brazilian Portuguese Spoken Language Research.- Dialogue Systems.- Interpretations and Discourse Obligations in a Dialog System.- Using Dialogues to Access Semantic Knowledge in a Web IR System.- Managing Dialog and Access Control in Natural Language Querying.- Summarization and Information Extraction.- GistSumm: A Summarization Tool Based on a New Extractive Method.- Topic Indexing of TV Broadcast News Programs.- Evaluation.- An Initial Proposal for Cooperative Evaluation on Information Retrieval in Portuguese.- Evaluation of Finite-State Lexical Transducers of Temporal Adverbs for Lexical Analysis of Portuguese Texts.- Evaluating Automatically Computed Word Similarity.- Evaluation of a Thesaurus-Based Query Expansion Technique.- Cooperatively Evaluating Portuguese Morphology.